Best of the Best Movies of 2026 So Far...So Far...
Let's take a look at nationwide Best of 2026 So Far lists in comparison to the Played in Madison in 2026 So Far list.
This past Friday, I posted a list of all of the films that played in Madison’s theaters (AMC Fitchburg, Flix Brewhouse, and Marcus Theatres) so far in 2026.
Today, I present an aggregate list of titles drawn from the widely seen mid-year articles usually named something like “The Best Movies of 2026 So Far.”
I’m not going to discuss the lists in any detail. I’m posting the aggregated list to set the stage for upcoming discussions about Madison’s theatrical film market.
My sample Best of 2026 So Far lists came from the following 17 sources: Collider, Complex, Consequence of Sound, Esquire, The Film Stage, The Hollywood Reporter, IndieWire, Letterboxd, Mashable, Metacritic, RogerEbert.com, Rolling Stone, Rotten Tomatoes, Screen Crush, Variety, and World of Reel.
I chose to use neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post, mainly because they would present paywall obstacles if you wanted to follow through and look at their lists.
I linked the sources to Google Notebook LM (so I chose and limited the sources), provided a prompt, and Notebook LM devised the following methodology to rank the films:
To calculate the top 20 films from the lists in the sources, a standardized scoring system was applied: films in ranked lists received points based on their exact position (e.g., 20 points for 1st place, scaling down accordingly), while films in unranked lists received the mathematical average score for that list’s length. This accounts for both how high a film ranked and how often it appeared.
In terms of methodology, there are all kinds of problems with all of this. But for my purposes here, I don’t really care.
All I wanted was a broad overview of what film titles came up on Best of 2026 So Far lists, so that we could discuss them in relation to the Films that Played at Madison Theaters list. Here’s what Google Notebook LM spat out, followed by the number of weeks the films appeared on the Now Playing lists in Moving Image Madison:
1. Project Hail Mary - 155.5 points (10 lists).
Played in Madison 14 weeks so far.
2. Obsession - 124.0 points (8 lists).
Played in Madison 7 weeks so far.
3. Blue Heron - 116.5 points (9 lists).
Screened twice at Wisconsin Film Festival. Has not returned for a theatrical run.
4. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple - 109.5 points (8 lists).
Played in Madison 3 weeks so far. (I need to double check that.)
5. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie - 94.5 points (7 lists).
Local premiere at UW-Cinematheque. Then played in Madison 3 weeks.
6. Is God Is - 88.0 points (7 lists).
Played in Madison 3 weeks so far.
7. I Love Boosters - 86.0 points (6 lists).
Played in Madison 4 weeks so far.
8. Send Help - 78.0 points (6 lists).
Played in Madison 7 weeks so far.
9. EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert - 68.5 points (6 lists).
Played in Madison 5 weeks so far.
10. The Christophers - 65.5 points (5 lists).
Local premiere at Wisconsin Film Festival. Then played in Madison 2 weeks.
11. The Sheep Detectives - 62.5 points (4 lists).
Played in Madison 8 weeks so far.
12. The Drama - 59.0 points (5 lists).
Played in Madison 7 weeks so far.
13. Backrooms - 57.0 points (4 lists).
Played in Madison 5 weeks so far.
14. Disclosure Day - 53.5 points (4 lists).
Played in Madison 3 weeks so far (opened June 12).
15. Our Land (Nuestra Tierra) - 52.5 points (5 lists).
Has not played theatrically in Madison. Latest film, a documentary, from Lucrecia Martel (Zama, 2017).
16. Yes - 52.5 points (5 lists).
Local premiere at Wisconsin Film Festival. Has not returned for a theatrical run.
17. Pillion - 52.5 points (5 lists).
Played in Madison 2 weeks.
18. Silent Friend - 48.0 points (3 lists).
Has not played theatrically in Madison.
19. Rose of Nevada - 47.0 points (5 lists).
Has not played theatrically in Madison
20. Exit 8 - 47.0 points (4 lists).
Played in Madison 3 weeks.
Coming in at #3 on the aggregated list, Blue Heron is the big missing piece in the theatrical puzzle in Madison so far this year. Yes, Blue Heron screened twice at the Wisconsin Film Festival (including a Thursday mid-day screening). And yes, that is great that it did. And yes, it is great that some films that played at either the Wisconsin Film Festival or UW-Cinematheque came back for short runs in Madison’s commercial theaters (Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie at #5; The Christophers at #10). But it is probably the time, after 25+ years of the UW-Cinematheque and the Wisconsin Film Festival (as well as other alternative venues like WUD Film and MMoCA), to come to terms to what impact they do or don’t have on the film market in Madison (not just on subjective impressions of Madison’s film culture).
I attempted, with admittedly mixed results, to write about this topic in Isthmus over 10 years ago (maybe it’s more like 14 years ago, I’ll have to look it up!). I ended up making a few people angry with me at the time. So this time around, I’m going to very gingerly approach the topic and slowly lay down the groundwork so that it doesn’t appear like I’m attacking anyone or being a Negative Nelly (Jaundiced Jimbo?). But the upshot of my point will be: There’s very little incentive for local theaters to play films like Blue Heron, and there’s very little incentive for independent film distributors to place films in Madison within an ever narrowing theatrical window.
It makes sense that Blue Heron hasn’t had a theatrical run in Madison, despite being #3 on the aggregated Best Films of 2026 So Far list. Discussion forthcoming. Meanwhile…
Thanks for compiling all this data. A few surprises in here, though largely what I expected to see. THE BONE TEMPLE deserved more than a three-week run here, and I have to imagine its last week was significantly truncated, too. Probably a result of being a January release. That is a shame.
The immense acclaim for PROJECT HAIL MARY still confuses me... I can't wait to be "right" about it in three years when we're evaluating the best films of the decade, and then the consensus flips, lol. "Why was this on our top-10 lists?" To me, it's very much a Marvel movie in disguise. Some entertaining bits here and there, I guess, but deeply unserious in tone. Wanted to see more of Sandra Hüller's Eva, who's kind of the dark heart of the movie, but the film (and perhaps source material) keeps its distance.
At the risk of sounding like me…
Jesus fuck…what a provincial list.
This isn’t a criticism of Jim’s compilation job or whatever (Great job, Jim!). This is my massive disappointment with what poses for film criticism in 2026. Do these so-called professional reviewers even watch movies that aren’t insipid bottom-of-the-barrel Hollywood fare? The top 14 are all English-language pictures, and, with the exception of “Blue Heron”, got relatively big, mainstream, nationwide releases. I’m not even paid to watch movies and I feel like I’ve seen a far more diverse selection than most of these reviewers.
The fact that “Is God Is” and “Disclosure Day” even cracked the top 20 is…somehow wrong in every conceivable sense…and I didn’t even hate either one. Grant may be shocked that “Project Hail Mary” made the list, but I’m more surprised at the number of schlocky horror movies that seem to garner (un-)critical acclaim these days. It feels like the entire critical establishment has lowered its collective standards and given a free pass to the genre. (For one example: “Sinners”, which made (and topped) a suspicious number of “Best of 2025” lists.)
It’s interesting to compare this list with the ones from the aggregators (RT, Metacritic), which are essentially doing much the same thing you did here with a less discriminating pool of reviewers (is it a less discriminating pool or less discriminating reviewers? I’ll let you decide). Many of the ones that reach the upper echelons of those lists aren’t on this one at all. Six of Metacritic’s top ten don’t make this list at all. Go figure.
This is also a proper damnation of where we are in terms of commercial film distribution and screenings. It would have been nice for “Blue Heron” to get a run in local theatres (even if it’s somewhat overrated by, well, everyone), but it’s hardly a surprise that it didn’t. I’d say this po-dunk mountain town is doing orders-of-magnitude better in this department than just a decade or two ago, but there are still tons of acclaimed films that don’t bother to wash up on our shores. Yet, we still have a new shitty horror movie or two in our multiplexes every week and entire months of the year that are suspiciously barren.
There’s also the issue of what counts as a 2026 film. (“The President’s Cake”, for example, was nominated for a Best International Feature Oscar, but I’m guessing it didn’t screen almost anywhere in the US until 2026…my own best of 2026 list is crawling with 2025 films that didn’t play here until 2026. Come to think of it, most of the ones on this compilation list are also from 2025.).
Incidentally, if July 1st is still a half-a-day or so before the midpoint of the year, “Minions & Monsters” opened just on time to make the best-of-the-first-half-of-2026 list.
Also, Jim: Your Esquire Link connects to Consequence of Sound’s list.